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Published Thursday September 10th, 2009 at 1:45am

Being sent to top-notch schools and having the love of a "nice" adoptive family was never enough for Dan Haines, 47. "I had all of the best things in life," he said. "But I still felt a hollowness. I constantly felt like something was missing from my life."

It took Dan Haines 37 years to find out who he was.

Now, the 47-year-old Egg Harbor City, New Jersey resident is fighting for the state Legislature to make it easier for other adoptees to get the same sense of wholeness that Haines said filled a lifelong void for him.

Haines' search for his identity began when he was 5 years old.

"I never fit in. I didn't look a thing like my parents. They had brown hair and brown eyes. I have blond hair and blue eyes. Things like that started making me very inquisitive," Haines said. "Then one day my mom sat me down and read me a book about being adopted. I told her that a terrible mistake had been made and that we had to call someone because my real family was out looking for me."

In actuality, adoption agency officials had told his birth mother to tell people her baby died during childbirth to keep the truth a secret. She obliged.

Being sent to top-notch schools and having the love of a "nice" adoptive family was never enough for Haines.

"I had all of the best things in life," he said. "But I still felt a hollowness. I constantly felt like something was missing from my life."

Haines had to wait until his oldest daughter, Ainsley, was born in 1989 to meet his first blood relative.

"I've looked into they eyes of a million people in my life," said Haines, a professional musician. "But when I looked into her eyes, it was the first time I ever felt like I could see myself. It was like I was looking into my own eyes."

After years of denying their existence, Haines' adopted mother reluctantly turned over documents containing information about Haines' true identity in 1996. In those pages he found his original last name - Graver.

He spent the next three years searching for his birth parents.

And then one day in 1999, Haines walked into a Pennsylvania store owned by his birth mother, Barbara Bird, and her husband, Russ.

He had arranged to meet her there by telling her that he was compiling a millennium retrospective for her old high school.

"But she knew who I was as soon as I walked through the door," Haines said. "I apparently look just like my father."

Bird explained to her son that she had put him up for adoption because at 17, she was too young to properly raise a child and her parents told her that they were not going to help her do it. Haines' birth father, Gary Root, died before he could meet him.

The mother and son stayed close until Bird's death in 2005. They would talk every weekend and even went skiing together.

"We were catching up on a life lost," Haines said. "And for the first time, we both had the closure we were deeply missing."

Haines is now trying to get the state legislature to pass legislation that would permit adult adoptees, and the parents of adopted minors, to have access to a copy of the adopted person's original birth certificate and other related information.

The legislation passed in the state Assembly in 1991 and 1994 and in the state Senate in 2004, 2006, and 2008, but has never had enough support to be made law.

"It is human nature to want to know where you came from. By keeping this information from us, they are denying us that," said Haines, who has twice testified in front of state Senate subcommittee on the issue.

Haines said adoptees should be given the same access to their parents' medical and cultural histories that others have.

"By finding my parents, I discovered that my father died from complications from diabetes at the same age I am now. And that breast cancer was prevalent in my mother's side of the family," he said. "Keeping this kind of information can be a death sentence."

On Aug. 21, the Egg Harbor City Council approved a resolution calling on the state legislature to pass the legislation.

"It's a step in the right direction," Haines said. "But there is still a long road ahead of us."